Our good child ransacked all her drawers, cupboards, reticules, and gimcrack boxes--passed in review all her gowns, fichus, tags, bobbins, laces, silk stockings, and fallals-- selecting this thing and that and the other, to make a little heap for Rebecca.

Those who saw them often asked how it was that a woman could keep her husband in good clothes, wear a Leghorn bonnet with flowers, embroidered muslin dresses, silk mantles, prunella boots, handsome fichus, a Chinese parasol, and drive home in a hackney-coach, and yet be virtuous; while Madame Colleville and other "ladies" of her kind could scarcely make ends meet, though they had double Madame Minard's means.

Then, as now, somber black was a mainstay color of mourning, whose latter stages could be enlivened by chic additions seen in fashion plates such as stripes, pierrots, fringe, muffs, embroidered fichus, and watch chains (145-46).

A gracious entrance hall leads into the living and dining room with its large crown mouldings, travertine floors and almost 10-foot high ceilings, and opens to a private landscaped backyard garden decorated with flowering bushes, an orchid tree and palms all enclosed within a 10 foot high fichus hedge.

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